Privacy | Vation.ca

Overview

We strongly support your right to privacy when using our apps and services.

Our privacy policy is simple: your data is none of our business. We make money by selling software and consulting services, not by mining your personal information.

To the extent that our apps and websites can provide their functionality without doing so, we prefer to avoid collecting data from you.

In the cases where we do collect data, we try to be clear about why we’re collecting it, tell you how long we keep it, delete it when we no longer need it, and give you the ability to opt out of collection whenever possible.

We use modern security measures to protect collected data, and limit access to only those employees who require access to perform their jobs. We may be legally required to disclose collected data to law enforcement or government agencies in some situations.

Support Interactions

When handling support requests from you, we collect:

your email address (or Twitter handle, if you contact us via Twitter)
any information you provide voluntarily (such as crash logs or other diagnostic info) This information is collected solely to help resolve your support inquiry. We retain support emails indefinitely in order to:
have context from previous interactions which may help us answer your future questions more quickly
identify broad trends in support requests, which may help us identify and solve problems with our products

If you would like to remove support emails you have sent, contact support@vation.ca.

Application Usage Analytics

Some of our apps may, by default, collect information about the way you use them. This data is anonymized before it is sent to us, and cannot be used to personally identify you. This is a feature of the Apple Testflight beta test process.

You may opt out of usage analytics if you wish. The setting is in Apple Testflight.

We look only for broad patterns in the aggregated usage data, such as whether or not a particular feature is frequently used, or whether users in general prefer one setting over another. This helps us make informed decisions about the future development of our apps.

To be clear, we do not track individual user behavior in our apps. We do not receive information from your device’s displays, cameras, or microphones.

Apple handles the usage retention.

Crash Logs

By default, if one of our apps crashes while you’re using it, anonymized data about the crash will be collected to help us identify the cause of the crash and hopefully fix it in a future update. These “crash logs” contain information such as the state of the app, operating system, and device at the time of the crash, but not your private data.

Apple handles the usage retention.

Apple may also collect crash logs if the privacy settings of your device allow it.

Update Checking

For iOS apps or apps acquired from the Mac App Store, update checking behavior is managed by the operating system, and the relevant information is processed by Apple.

For apps acquired via direct download from the vation.ca website, an update check request will be occasionally sent to a vation.ca-owned server. This request contains the name and current version of the app you are using, and a small amount of metadata about your device (such as which operating system version it is running, and your preferred language) which may be necessary to guide you to the correct update version.

You may turn off update checking from the app’s preferences window.

Activation

Activation is the process by which our applications verify that you are a legitimately licensed owner of the product you’re using.

For iOS apps or apps acquired from the Mac App Store, no activation request is sent to Vation Inc.-owned servers. Verification of your purchase may occur by processes and servers managed by Apple in this case.

Logging

When you interact with our servers using a web browser, or indirectly by network requests sent on your behalf by our apps, some metadata about the request is logged. This metadata may include:

your IP address (may reveal your approximate geographic location)
the name of the resource requested
the name and version number of the software making the request (may reveal information about your web browser, operating system, and their configuration)
whether or not the request was successful
current date and time

We generally don’t look at these logs unless a server is malfunctioning or appears to be getting used in a malicious way. We may look at the information in aggregate to see broad statistics such as how many times our apps have been downloaded, or from which source an unusually high amount of network traffic is arriving.

We retain web server logs for two weeks.

Third-Party Vendor Services Used

Payment processing, update checking, and license management of iOS apps and apps purchased from the Mac App Store is managed by Apple.
Activation services for direct download apps are managed internally by vation.ca.

Data Not Collected

Except as described above, and as required to perform the application’s core functionality at the user’s request, vation.ca apps do not send out any private information. This includes:

Information from device sensors
Your keyboard input
Screen contents
Network traffic
Hostnames
Usernames
Passwords
SSH / Encryption keys
Contents of files you are working with

Opting Out

Be aware that the operating system may still collect crash logs and other analytics and send them to Apple unless you have disabled that separately in the operating system’s settings.

Backed-up Data

As you might expect, we keep backups of company data so that a catastrophic data loss event doesn’t put us out of business. Although collected personal data expires from our “active” data set according to the schedules mentioned above, it may persist in backups for up to 1 year. Backups are only accessible to specially privileged employees who perform system administration tasks. We consider the backups “cold storage” and we don’t pull data from them unless a significant data loss event has occurred.

Citizens of the EU may exercise their rights under the General Data Protection Regulation, such as the rights of access and erasure, by contacting us with their request. We recommend emailing the request to gdpr@vation.ca.

Questions and Feedback

Our privacy policies might change or be edited for clarity over time. Up-to-date information will always be available from this page.

Please contact us if you have any questions about our data collection or privacy policies. We’ll be more than happy to discuss them with you.